On Wednesday it was reported on Radio 4 that around 100 police statements were altered following the Hillsborough disaster and the situation was made to look like the fault of the public rather than the police.  Someone speaking on Radio 4 said that they did not normally believe conspiracy theories but that this time it was evident.

But that fact has taken all these years to be established and be reported.

To me it seems reasonable to believe that there are many other conspiracy theories which are equally true, including the conspiracy of the mental health system and its brutal approach to helping people to deal with their mental health problems, relationship problems, emotional problems.

I say therapy which is therapy is consenting, and nothing involuntary can fit that description or be ultimately therapeutic (unless it is shock therapy or reality therapy, but then is it really therapy, or just more repression/suppression and ‘learning your lesson’?).

Twenty-three years after Hillsborough this has come out, though the event is over and done with.  For people enmeshed in the mental health system it is ongoing and some do not survive.  People have been killed by inappropriate restraint methods and application, as well as by death at their own hands for others, preferring, I suppose, to die at their own hands rather than to keep going through the seemingly endless cycle of crisis and hospital admissions where the facts they know of their lives, better than the mental health service staff do, are often invalidated and contradicted by the insistence on a mental health diagnosis. 

I have recently felt hopeless and helpless and that, if I were a different person, I might kill myself rather than continue to go through this cycle.  I did deliberately overdose once, in 2003.  I took almost 100 paracetamol and lay down to sleep, not caring whether I woke or not.  I woke and stumbled into the kitchen and vomited.  The church I was going to at the time didn’t know this, but it was just before I was confirmed.  I ended up in hospital on a drip.

I have heard since Wednesday another programme on Radio 4 talking about the IPCC (Independent Police Complaints Commission) and the experience of some that it has failed to deliver for them.  I have only approached them about one thing and I didn’t follow it through to the end.  I tried, but the police service was not very co-operative and I ended up leaving it because of other more immediate pressures.

I spoke to one of the nurses recently and told her that the support I needed was legal support in the community when situations arose which I had not contributed to in the locality and which were a disturbance to me.  I mentioned that the police are supposed to do something after the third report from one individual, and she said that what they did would not necessarily be what the individual wanted and that they would not necessarily interpret the situation as the individual did.  She also said that the police are a law to themselves, a statement which could be interpreted her evasion of the issue, among other possibilities.